Minds

(English)

Popularity was a sucker’s game.

There were a million-and-one stereotypes about school cliques; jocks and nerds, geeks and freaks. But most kids realize too late that, like almost all stereotypes, they had no basis in reality. My high school’s star point guard played third or fourth chair in the orchestra. And even if people’s time demanded they pick one hobby over others, everyone had friends with feet in other worlds.

Once upon a time, I’d been told that popularity was a matter of being extroverted enough at the right times. As a then-self-described introvert, that had been what I aimed at for a long time.

But I’d learned esteem in the eyes of your peers was a lot more about your peers than it was about you.

So now I was having to work against my own instincts here. I needed to schmooze, cajole, and endear myself to people who all thought I thought they were stupid.

Trouble was, they were almost right. While I didn’t think anyone here was truly stupid, I did think they were making some righteously dumb decisions. It wasn’t like I hadn’t made similarly bad assumptions either. And if I were in any other situation, addressing that would have been my preferred tack. Just because you were smart, didn’t mean you couldn’t also be dumb…that message had gotten through to the Beacon entity quite well, I thought. But I couldn’t play that card here without tipping my identity to Kemon.

If I was honest, I was making more of an obstacle for myself than I strictly needed to.

All I had to do was lie to my fellow abductees, and I loathed that idea. I wanted to have good relationships with these people long after we left Kemon behind.

So how did I get people to like me, without sharing my past, and without lying?

Sharing my past was out of the question…but using what I’d learned from it wasn’t. And the power of experience was in changing the future. An idea began to coalesce in my head. If it panned out, I wouldn’t have to wait that long. I could improve their present instead.

Only trouble was, my idea was a bit outside my skillset…

Hadn’t Shinshay mentioned something about Jordan making a bass?

·····

“Sure, I’ll help,” Jordan promised. “But maybe this time, do a dry run first?”

“Practice is tonight,” I said. “I’ve gotta finish my math on the circuitry first, but I’ll be ready right after dinner.”

“Cool, want me to bring Drew?” Jordan asked.

“She play?”

“We learned together,” Jordan nodded.

“Bet,” I said, heading out to find my other helper.

I very badly wanted to stay with Jordan and the psionics crew. The majority of the activity group was on the young side, but they were showing everyone the neuroplasticity of youth. Based on some of the work some of the eight-graders had done, I was beginning to suspect that Kemon had gotten his spiffy psionics from a very young abductee rather than one of the older crowd.

Investigating that possibility, collaborating on new psionics, and most of all helping Jordan forge her own superconstruct…

I really wanted to stay.

But I needed to find Sid instead.

Most days after lunch, he would hang out on the recreation platform with his stacks of textbooks. Except today, when I went looking, he was nowhere to be found. His crate of books was undisturbed today, tucked against his usual couch.

I reached to speak into my psionic transceiver only to freeze.

The public bands would contact him in a second, but I couldn’t be sure he’d actually respond. Plus, the whole reason I was doing this was because I wasn’t very popular right now. Bothering everyone on those bands probably wouldn’t help.

Ah, but clever old me knew psionics better than most. I modified my transmitter to twist my psychic-voice into one that sounded like Jordan’s.

I asked.

he replied.

I answered as ‘Jordan’.

On the private channel, Jordan, having heard my question along with everyone else, sent a psionic flick my direction.

I told her, privately.

Sidney was indeed atop the plateau Win’s gaggle used for training. Ben was currently sparring with Aarti and trouncing her handily.

Ben’s cold gun was quite the mean feat, and someday I wanted to examine it inside and out. It relied on at least five different Adept principles that I had no grasp of whatsoever, and what little I did understand was still impressive. He carried a tank on his back with partially created exotic fluid. The gun channeled the half-complete fluid through a tube, spraying it at a target where it finished solidifying on contact.

Aarti was trapped on three sides by rough walls of ice taller than she was with the open side leaving her exposed to the plateau’s edge.

“The fight is unfair!” Win shouted, maybe trying to encouraging? “Keep moving!”

Sid was off to the side, watching along with Madeline and Vez.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” Sid said coolly.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“When this is done,” he said, keeping his eyes on the spar.

Aarti was trying to escape the walls pinning her to the plateau’s edge…by skirting around the end of the wall jutting out by that same edge.

If this hadn’t been a spar, it still would have been dangerous. One slip of her feet and she would fall the forty feet down the slope of the plateau.

I warned, aiming a message at only her.

Her eyes widened, trying to look through the ice for who’d spoken, but she didn’t seem to realize it was me.

she said.

I replied.

Her eyes lit up and she immediately backed away from the cliff’s edge, and she materialized spikes crudely fused into Ben’s own ice. They weren’t attached by the fancy magnetism I used, but it got the job done.

She darted over the wall and suddenly had loads more room to maneuver.

Ben hadn’t taken advantage of the vulnerable position he’d put her in either. He’d elected to use the time to refill his tank instead of trying to win. Maybe he was trying to be sporting.

I advised.

Attacking a weapon with unknown design to it could be risky. But the storage tank was just a way for him to cheat how much ice he could spray at once. Spilling its contents should be fine.

Aarti did so, blitzing him head on. Ben aimed his gun to catch her directly with a spray of ice and I stepped forward in concern.

But Sid and Maddie both stopped me just before Aarti made her move.

Five paces away from him, she thrust her hand out and a hot red flash shone for a split second before the snowy white burst from the gun exploded into a thick cloud of fog.

The sound of glass or plastic could be heard somewhere in the cloud. Then a panicked Ben shouting.

“Ahh! Agghh! No, no!”

“” Win shouted. I spied his own hand cradling a blob of exotic fluid, ready to hurl it forward.

Too many seconds passed before the cloud of fog vanished along with the rest of Ben’s ice. When it did, we were treated to a view of Aarti standing over Ben, her foot pinning his shoulder triumphantly.

“You two both alright?” Win asked. The question was more aimed at Ben.

“Bruised ego,” Ben grumbled.

“Chilly,” Aarti grinned.

For a second there, Win and I had been the only ones to know how close these two came to disaster. This was way over the line. It was the riskiest form of sparring with no room for error. Looking at Win’s face and his psionic emanations, he wasn’t concerned.

His alarm had faded as quickly as the fog. But I knew that fog had dematerialized too slowly. Vanishing your own creations quickly was vital for practicing Adeptry as safely as possible. Did he just have low regard for their safety? He didn’t seem like someone too inexperienced to know better.

“That’s enough for now,” he said.

“Boo-yah!” Aarti grinned. “Does that clinch my spot, or what?”

Johnny nodded. So did Ben, if more reluctantly. “As far as I’m concerned, yeah. If you beat one of us, you’re one of the Ronin.”

Aarti danced a little jig and Madeline sauntered forward to congratulate her friend. She spared a glance at me, but nothing more.

Drat. I liked her.

Priorities, Caleb. Winning over everyone would take patience. Some people might take more time than others.

“Does that name sound as dumb to you as it does to me?” I asked. “I mean, ‘the Ronin’? It’s a little…you know?”

“You just saw how they can fight,” Sid said dismayed, “and you don’t think it merits at least a little cool name?”

“They’re a little full of it,” I remarked. “They’re good, but they don’t hold a candle to some of the Adepts I’ve seen.”

“The Adepts you’ve seen surely benefited from Vorak military training,” Vez remarked, moving to join the rest of the socializing ‘Ronin’ and Ronin-hopefuls.

I exercised the better part of valor and didn’t dignify that with a response. Sid noticed me pursing my lips though.

“I’m surprised you didn’t have anything to say back,” he said.

“Oh, I did,” I said. “It’s just I’m here to rebuild bridges, as it were. So since I didn’t have something nice to say…”

I let the rest go unsaid.

“Smart,” Sid conceded. “Now what do you want?”

“Your musical expertise,” I said. “You play something?”

“…Yeah?”

“Come on, don’t leave me hanging,” I pouted.

“Guitar,” he said.

“Electric or acoustic?”

“Both,” he frowned. “Why do you ask?”

I flashed him a ‘rock on’ with one hand. “Because I’m getting the band back together.”

That piqued his curiosity enough to drag him away from the Adept activity group. We left them to their excited chat, but I didn’t miss the puzzled look on Aarti’s face as we left.

It wasn’t until I met back up with Jordan that I remembered my transmitter was still twisted to sound like her voice.

·····

Practice was going well as the hour approached. I would have liked to smooth out more rough edges, but my musicians were chomping at the bit to proceed.

“A guitar, bass, plus whatever Jordan’s playing is more than enough. We can go!”

“I still think you should try materializing some real drums,” Sid said.

“Ted,” was Drew’s only answer.

“But Ted can’t play drums,” Sid pointed out.

“I’m better than a drummer,” I frowned. “I’m like a DJ with a machine. I can loop whatever beat we imagine into the amp.”

Sid and Jordan both rolled their eyes, and I could only assume Drew did too.

“Just because you can use psionics to keep a beat does not mean you’re better than a drummer,” Drew said. “But…we appreciate the sentiment you’re going for. A beat is important, and you do provide that.”

“And then some,” Jordan agreed.

She strummed a chord on her not-really-a-bass, and the electric sound rolled through the camp. We’d been keeping our practice pretty quiet so far. I’d been psionically simulating what it would properly sound like, but that left something to be desired.

As soon as we started to make more noise, we’d draw a crowd back to the rec platform. Which was the whole point.

“Pretty sure even the hiking and biking group heard that,” Drew pointed out.

“Are we pulling the trigger then?” Sid asked.

“I figure we keep noodling until more people get curious,” I said. “Then do a big flashy start once there’s more people here to wow.”

“It’s your show,” Sid shrugged.

The three of them were the talent. Jordan had made all three instruments they were playing, her sister on a familiar bass guitar, Sid playing a conventional electric guitar. But Jordan herself had split the difference on her own instrument. She played something I had no word for with six strings like a guitar, but thicker ones than normal, like a bass.

Adeptry was just too flexible. I wasn’t sure if she’d tried something like this before, but if she hadn’t, it didn’t show. An instrument custom designed to the exact specifications in her mind…maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising how easily it came to her.

My contribution to the design was the metal cable jabbed into all three instruments’ bodies. Shinshay had taught me the basics of circuitry and power supply, and those lessons had paid off. The amp and its cables took up every shred of my nineteen-kilogram mass limit.

But unlike a real amp, I didn’t have to make mine out of the same materials as on Earth. My almost-forty-pound amp had the juice and sound of one twice as heavy. Jordan had helped me tinker with the design so the speakers and magnets sounded just right.

The real genius of the creation was in my head though. I’d drummed up a rudimentary psionic equivalent to audio software, and just like the guitars fed signals into the amp, I could capture sounds and feed them into the same speaker, all with psionic precision timing.

The problem with the setup we’d used for the movie and other music was that it was too based on the perception of the individual. So the speaker’s output had varied depending on who was translating the sound from the phone to the speaker.

But with a little skullduggery, Adeptry, and trial and error, I’d grasped how devices output sounds as electrical impulses. I could still add in sounds based on my own perception, especially simple ones like to supply a beat, but the system could work without any human involved if it had to.

Like any good speaker system should.

No more muddy audio on movie nights. I was already thinking about making psionic subtitles to help the aliens have a bit more context.

Was this bribery?

Part of me thought it was immature to try to win some esteem by just making myself useful, but when the first couple people trickled in I lost all my doubts. Middle schoolers could be cruel, it was true. But no one shows unabashed enthusiasm like kids.

Even with just discordant strumming going on, the sheer volume of the amp made it an exhilarating experience, and that showed on everyone’s face.

When Johnny and Madeline led Win and the Ronin in from practice, I knew we had the right people to begin in earnest.

I asked.

Jordan asked.

Sid said.

I disagreed.

she said.

Psionic sheet music had been Drew’s idea. I had to take the others’ word for it, but it was apparently insanely unfair. Not only could they read their music without looking at anything, the sheets were interactive, changing with the beat to show exactly which note they were on at any one time.

There’d been some paper sheet music in the bags of a few abductees, but none of it had been the kind of high energy song I was looking for. I wanted to impress people, and the sisters had more than come through on that front.

It had taken them only a few minutes to reverse engineer psionic sheets for songs they’d memorized back home. Lucky for me, their taste in music rocked and rolled.

I didn’t recognize half the titles on the sheet music, and there wasn’t a single song we played through in its entirety.

But the highlights? The most memorable riffs? Those were the parts my bandmates had practiced long and hard back home. They were the fun parts.

‘Layla’ and ‘Crazy Train’ were my only suggestions to the set, and even then it was in name only. But those melodies were iconic enough to be recreated by ear.

Jordan tried her hand at some Boston, and Sid knew multiple Toto songs in their entirety. The only thing I thought we were missing was vocals, but if that was all we were missing, I’d make my peace with it.

Even without any singing, people started cheering. That put a smile on my face, but it wasn’t until Kemon showed up looking slightly confused did I really start to enjoy myself.

One thing I’d never mastered during my time in theater was how to close a scene. So instead of a big finale, our musical number petered out. The mood stayed up though, and that was what counted.

As expected, Jordan and Drew got most of the attention. Sid would have gotten more, but he made himself scarce once we were done.

“That was awesome!” Madeline said. “You made those instruments?”

“Anyone can do that part,” Jordan said. “The real magic is Ted’s speaker and amp.”

That made a few people’s expression falter, but I was ready this time.

“I’ve been a pill since I got here,” I admitted. “But I wanted to do something nice for everyone. I might disagree with some of the stuff we’re getting up to here, but that’s not a good reason to get upset with you guys. Sid reminded me that we’re all in the same boat. It’s time like I started acting like it.”

“Big of you to admit that,” Johnny said.

“If you think this was good, arrange another movie for tonight. I can plug my speaker directly into the laptop,” I said. “No more muddy audio.”

“Hey, I worked really hard on that…” Ben protested.

“It must be your day to take your lumps then,” Johnny said. “You really going to say Ted’s doesn’t sound better?”

“No…” he admitted.

“I’ll show you how I made it,” I told Ben. “I charted the design psionically.”

Kemon himself took a personal interest, listening closely while I gave Ben diagrams for circuit construction and a rectifier.

“Dude, this is insanely complicated,” he said.

“True. Just always keep track of when wires are hot. And, just because something is disconnected from a power supply doesn’t mean it can’t still shock you. Capacitors hold onto a charge even after your supply is disconnected or shorted,” I said.

“Okay, I’m really interested in learning this,” Ben said apologetically, “but there’s no way I’m picking it all up tonight. Let’s just use your setup for tonight, cool?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m curious about that setup myself,” Kemon said, wandering closer. “Some of the sounds coming through the speaker did not seem like they were made by the stringed instruments.”

“I added some synthetic percussion from my imagination,” I answered, feeding a few pops and thumps through the speaker’s psionic inputs.

“Fascinating…” he murmured in Starspeak. The hair on the back of my neck rose. I’d missed something, but I couldn’t be sure how important.

“Ben’s setup could only relay sounds his own ears heard,” Kemon noted. “But you can produce sounds spontaneously. Even voices?”

“It would take some practice, I think, but yeah,” I said.

“Mmm…” Kemon hummed thoughtfully.

“Wait a dang second!” Aarti said, swooping in from nowhere. “That wasn’t Jordan, it was you! Doing her voice!”

“What?” Ben asked confused.

“When I beat you,” she explained. “Someone psionically gave me a hint. It sounded like Jordan, but she was nowhere nearby. This guy duped her voice.”

I couldn’t tell if she was impressed or offended.

“I thought if I was the one asking where Sid was, people might get snippy,” I said. “I forgot I still had the filter there when I watched your match.”

“Mmm…I guess that’s not too bad,” Aarti said. “You did have good advice.”

Ben stared at me oddly. “I didn’t know you knew anything about fighting.”

“It’s easy to notice more from the sidelines,” I hedged.

I kept teaching Ben what I could about how I built each part of the speaker, but soon Ike and Sid retrieved today’s cooler full of rations. Everyone grabbed their foil-wrapped nutrient bar and settled in for an unexpected second movie night in a row.

Tonight’s showing was Home Alone 3, and I realized just how weird the contents of Ben’s laptop were.

A dozen eclectic movies were pirated to the hard drive, not all of them good, and more than a few of them that would be hard to explain. Die Hard 3 and Django Unchained especially seemed like the kind of movies we probably shouldn’t show to middle schoolers. Or aliens.

Maybe if we explained the context beforehand, we could get ahead of the problem if we ever did watch those movies…

Wait…getting ahead of a problem…

Kemon had brought up in front of multiple people how I could fabricate voices psionically. What if one of them had been his? Couldn’t I have falsified a confession of whatever I wanted from him?

“Son of a…” I trailed off.

He’d recognized a possible vulnerability before I had, and totally shut me down ahead of time.

“What is it?” Madeline asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll be right back. I gotta talk to the boss man.”

I climbed down the scaffolding to the shacks on ground level and knocked on the door of one.

“Yes?” Kemon answered from within.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” I said.

“Come in, Junior Ted,” he said. “How can I help?”

“What are you afraid I’ll tell people?” I asked him, skipping the small talk.

“I’m sorry?”

“You drew attention to the ways my sound system could be abused, falsifying voices. Why? Why are you afraid I might make you say something?”

“…You haven’t exactly been subtle about your disapproval,” he said. “It seemed the most diplomatic way to prevent anyone—not just you—from fabricating false testimony.”

“You should ask someone what ‘projecting’ is,” I said. “Because you’ve got me wondering if there isn’t something you don’t want anyone hearing.”

“Young Ted,” Kemon sighed, switching back to English, “I thought we’d moved past this. Do you still not trust my motives?”

“I don’t know your motives,” I said. “Just your actions. And I can’t make sense of you yet. You rescue Jordan’s ships from pirates, but then you take us to the middle of nowhere. You say you’re just helping us to spite the Vorak. But is that really all?”

“Pirates are a symptom,” Kemon said. “And I might hate the symptom more than the cause, but I’m not foolish enough to let that dictate my decisions. Sheltering you Humans is the best way I know how to hurt said cause. As long as you’re all safe, the Vorak suffer. What more can I say to convince you?”

I decided to roll the dice. If my bluff got called, I could explain it away. But if it provoked a real answer…

“…You can tell me what the ‘Org’ is,” I said.

I used the abbreviated name, in Starspeak no less. The way my alias might have overheard it in a conversation he wasn’t supposed to hear. Without any context, I wouldn’t know what it meant.

Fear flickered through Kemon’s expression, the emotion even flared up enough to register through his opaque psionic firewall. It was only for a second though. If I hadn’t been watching for something, I would have missed the tiny moment where he froze.

Instead, he mastered his expression, idly wondering. “It’s a group that oversees terraforming ecosystems. Why do you ask?”

“Because when I was with those Coalition soldiers before Win picked me up, they were very hush-hush about not saying certain words around us. Except no one here has talked about the ‘Org’ either,” I said.

“This planet can’t support an ecosystem,” Kemon said, almost relieved. “There’s no reason I can think the word would ever come up. Or should we just keep vomiting forth every word we might never use around here?”

“I’d love that,” I said. “It’s called a dictionary.”

He began to hide his irritation less now, openly scowling at me.

“You’re just determined to be difficult, aren’t you?”

“Well there’s a saying from home about pots and kettles…” I said. “You’re up to something, and you’re abusing my fellow abductees’ gratitude to do it. And I’m going to find out.”

“…Tread carefully,” Kemon warned darkly. “Don’t say anything you’ll regret, or else your own kind will swallow you whole.”

“Is that a threat?” I asked.

“It’s the truth,” he said. “If you try to lie about me and my crew, you’ll only be hurting yourself.”

“Because you made sure everyone knows I can fake your voice,” I said. “So even if you confessed whatever it is, and I recorded it psionically…no one would ever believe me.”

“You said it, not me,” he shrugged.

Staring right at his smug face, I could feel myself losing my cool. Time to pull out before things got any worse. I stood to leave, but I wasn’t quite mature enough to leave without a parting dig.

I swiped my hand through some of the papers on his desk, scattering them.

“Oops,” I said.

Kemon only snorted as I left.

I didn’t go back to the movie night. I wasn’t second guessing myself anymore. Kemon had seen he’d failed to convince me, so he’d changed tactics. The joke was on him though. Trying to intimidate me was just going to make me more motivated.

Plus, it gave me more room to lie. I had no problems pretending to be intimidated.

I was beginning to think Kemon wasn’t as good at this as I’d first thought. In a way, it reminded me of my earliest distrust of Nai. We’d both thought the other a lot more threatening than we truly were. We were both flawed people capable of making mistakes.

Kemon was no different. His strategy had weak points. His act had flaws.

He couldn’t just make mistakes…

He’d already made one.

Our earlier conversation floated back to me. Kemon had laid out the broad strokes of how caring for us harmed the Vorak. I knew better than to buy the argument, because caring for us only harmed the Vorak if the Vorak had invested in abducting us in the first place.

And I knew they hadn’t.

Because I’d run across someone, some thing really involved.

So when I slowed down and reviewed exactly what Kemon had said…it stuck out. One detail he’d included was damning.

He’d said ‘five-thousand’ abductees were out there.

Nora, Nai, and I were the only people to actually get the information firsthand.

Laranta and some of her direct subordinates probably knew…

But I knew for a fact Hakho didn’t. Laranta had made sure to copy the Jack on all correspondence distributed to the rest of the Coalition. She hadn’t shared that with Hakho. And if Hakho never had it, Kemon couldn’t leverage him for it.

So how had Kemon gotten that juicy tidbit of information?

That wasn’t a detail we’d shared with anyone in Mummar either…We’d kept the exact figure vague. Nora hadn’t broadcast the total number of abductees either. Keeping people in the dark about how many of us there might be kept people searching intently in all corners of the cosmos.

But Kemon had specifically said ‘five-thousand’.

How had he known?

How could he have known?

My eyes drifted to the giant projector at the back of the mega-lounge platform, more specifically…the laptop it was connected to.

By Earth standards, it was pretty bulky. Two inches thick, but with a sleek design and multicolor lights. Some type of gaming rig, for sure.

By alien standards, it was quite possibly the most portable computer in the known universe though. And we were using it to watch movies…

Hah.

Alien computers, while potentially powerful, were rarely portable. For months, the most portable technology I’d ever seen from them had been in the hands of the Red Sails, and that device had the power of an old blackberry in platform fifty-times more massive.

And then I’d crossed paths with Asu Tolar. And in his sealed office, he’d had a laptop computer of truly alien design, unfamiliar to human, Casti, Farnata, and presumably Vorak minds alike. It had been custom work with a direct line to ENVY.

And what wouldn't I bet that Kemon had one just like it somewhere?

Nothing came to mind.

All-in.